Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

August 29, 2007

As some of you may remember, I'm quite a fan of Pageflakes, to the extent that I use it constantly and if pushed would say that it's my #1 2.0 resource. A month or so ago they produced the Blizzard Release. Rather than just jump right in when it came out I thought I'd wait awhile before commenting. It actually settled down very quickly, probably due to the extensive beta testing that went on in the background and which I was part of.

If you haven't tried Pageflakes in the last few months I'd suggest taking another look; I think you'll be impressed. There are a number of new things to look at:

You can personalise your page with one button

It's easier to publish and share pages with other people

You can use different themes to personalise the look and feel of every page.

Add your own personal profile

Find and add people to your favourites

Use any of over 240,000 widgets and look at over 100,000 pagecasts (shared pages)

The Anything Flake allows you to embed anything you want onto a page, providing you've got some HTML to use

There's a newly improved multimedia RSS tool.

The pages are cleaner with less intrusive controls, although I find the small icon to open a flake properly (half diamond bottom middle of a flake) rather irritating, and to open/close a flake as a result requires more mouse movement than is really necessary. You can send flakes to friends, copy a flakes HTML code, cut and paste it onto your blog or website.

It's still by far and away the best of the start pages that I've looked at, and if you haven't tried one yet, I'd strongly recommend playing around with it.

A voice of sanity from Vint Cerf via the BBC entitled Call to regulate the net rejected. He makes the very sensible point that the net reflects society, and to limit beyond what is clearly illegal puts people on a slippery slope - "If it's not illegal, it raises a rather interesting question about where you do draw the line." He goes on to say "We have a job to do, collectively as a society, to deal with the problems we discover in the network but suppressing the knowledge of what's going on isn't going to help us. We need to face that problem directly".

Interesting sidelight onto the whole issue of filtering, mentioned below in another posting.

The Role of Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web. This comes from Publish2 Blog and links to some videos that Robert Scoble (late of Microsoft) talks about how resources such as TechMeme, Mahalo and Facebook will beat Google. There's no doubt that using people to provide content is a good idea, and I've argued on behalf of resources such as Intute for years. However, I don't see any of these resources replacing Google any time soon, for one simple reason - if there's any chance that Google think this is going to happen they'll institute a new resource that does the same thing. Long gone are the days when Google innovated - I can point to any number of resources out there that do a superior job to Google - that's not the point. Google can simply take a concept and run with it, and they have the money to do exactly that.

However, do spend a few minutes with the videos - Scoble is always worth listening to!

The news item Student cracks Government's $84m porn filter would be funny if it wasn't tragic. The Australian government spent $84 million on an internet porn filter that could be downloaded and used in schools, libraries and so on. A 16 year old schoolboy promptly broke it in 30 minutes, so they added an upgrade to the system and he broke that in 40 minutes. Needless to say there is quite a lot of 'wasting our Australian tax dollars' chat at the moment, as you'll see if you read the article from news.com.au. iTWire showed how to crack it rather less elegantly in 5 mouse clicks though this was done by the chap who installed it, so it's slightly less impressive.

If you're interested in this, you might want to take a look at 'Should Google filter its image database?' which gives good reasons why some authorities don't want them to. (There is of course another argument around the subject of why should Google be responsible for policing the world, but lets not go there in this post.) You might also want to take a peek at how it's possible to use the Google cache to view sites (which is a great resource, but open to porn surfing as well).

August 23, 2007

Microsoft are experimenting again, this time with a thing called tafiti. Apparently Swahili for 'yet another search engine that no-one wants or needs' or some such. Or maybe just 'to search'. Anyway, it's new, and looks shiny, apart from the image of a very old catalogue card that they use as a search box, and which slides off to the side once a search has been run, wasting space, but looking funky.

Before you can use it you have to install something called 'Silverlight'. I don't know why and MS isn't saying, all they do say is 'just don't it!'. However, I'm a trusting soul, and if Mr BG wants me to install Silverlight to look at this thing, well, that's what I'll do. Dunno how many others will though - surprisingly it works on Firefox.

So, you get a catalogue card as your search box, whack in a search and get a bunch of the usual MS results up on screen. You click on the links, scroll down (only it scrolls off the end of the screen and I couldn't see anyway to move to see the rest of what I was being offered). However, you can also save results to little glass shelves (no, I'm not making this up) to the right of the screen. You can save these results between sessions, the idea being that you can create a whole bunch of results and collate them, which is a nice idea, though not exactly brand new.

There's also a 'tree' view, and the screen shot is taken from this page. It's clearly an attempt to be funky and down with the kids, and reminds me of visual search engines like Kartoo. So, nothing new there then either. Irritatingly, this tree like affair spins around, slowly and dizzyingly and made me feel quite ill. There were plenty of other bugs and glitches - slow loading, no loading, freezing and suchlike, but I guess that's to be expected as it's experimental, and so unfair to be critical, but if you play with this, expect it.

To be honest, I wasn't impressed, but you've guessed that already haven't you? It didn't seem to add much, and as an experimental search engine MS really do need to think a bit more outside their tiny box, because I wasn't interested or inspired. In fact, a very insipid search engine all round.

August 21, 2007

Safe Search Engines For Children. I was pointed towards this blog entry which looks at 13 search engines for children, and ranks them on a basis of visual appeal, relevance, commercial v educational and ease of navigation. The author (didn't notice who it was, and they weren't making it plain) reckons that Quintura Kids comes out on top, although it got exactly the same results as one called Fact Monster. Obviously this is going to be a personal choice, but it's an interesting matrix to look at if you're interested in such things. I've looked at Quintura Kids before, but I thought I'd take another look. It's pretty much as it was the last time I saw it. Nice simple interface, with a number of predefined search terms, such as 'around the world' (though the first 9 entries were all US based which didn't quite make sense to me), and when you run a search you get a nice little tag cloud at the top of screen, giving good navigation. The content is based on Yahoo for Kids, so you're really just comparing interfaces more than anything else.

There are a few oddities - the words 'lesbian' and 'gay' are acceptable, but 'homosexual' isn't, which struck me as a little odd. Nothing for 'confederate states america' and for 'confederate states' there was one reference, to the Emancipation Proclamation, and that I thought was a little odd. I'd have expected some general reference or link to a site offering an overview of American history, but there you are.

Of course, the problem with all of these things is 'what is a 'kid'?' I don't actually like the word myself, but that's by the by. A 6 year old isn't going to have the same interests as a 15 year old, but they can both be classed as children. There's no clear indication on the site as to what they class as a 'kid', but then one could say the same of most examples of this type of search engine.

So, if you've an interest, it's worth a quick read, with useful pointers to various engines.

August 20, 2007

Ariadne Issue 52. This is now available online via the link. I wasn't able to do my usual search engine column this time around for obvious reasons, but there's still a lot of really useful stuff to take a peek at.

August 19, 2007

PeekYou Beta 2.0 | The Smartest People Search Online. Smartest people search? They are joking arn't they? OK, let me start at the beginning. This has apparently got 50,397,199 profiles online, which it has grabbed from a variety of different social networks. Whack in a name or a user name and see what comes out. Lots of stuff from MySpace, and people very sensibly set their profiles to private, so that's not actually that much help when you're trying to track someone down.

The information you get is fairly sparse - name, photo if available, links to original resources and that's about it. The interface is bad, and as basic as they come, with the exception that they'll proffer some suggestions while you're typing. The system is heavily US biased although there is a UK version. You click on that and third person in (automatically loaded, for reasons that escape me) is some chap from Malaysia. Err? So, you can limit by World (48mil), UK (19K) and then region and town. Great if you know where the person you want to find it, pointless if you don't. So still being in the UK section, you type in the name of the person you want and it goes back to giving you a bunch of people from the US.

August 17, 2007

About LocateTV is something that I've been playing with today. Basically it lets you find out information on your favourite television programmes. It tells you if they're on and when, and on what channel, provides you with a summary of the episode, links for cast members and so on.

It's not perfect - I'd really like to see it linked into proper tv schedules, links to 'if you like this you might like that', 2.0 things such as groups and discovering via networks. However it does let you embed stuff so that you can share it with other people - I'm including an example below. As a start, it's a good one, and quite interesting. It's in closed beta at the moment, but they're actively looking for bloggers and people with an interest in media/television and so on. If you think you fit the bill, I'm sure they'll send you an invite!

Thanks to so many people who I'm just not going to be able to list or thank individually for taking the time and trouble to send cards, pictures, flowers and gifts to Jill during this difficult time. We thought you might like to see the 'positive wall', which has got so large we've had to move it upstairs to our bedroom. It's the first thing we seen in the morning and it gives us both a real boost.

We do have good news - we've met up with her Consultant who has told us that the tumor came out easily and it doesn't appear to have spread to her lymph nodes or to her liver. There's still a question mark over what exactly he did find there, so she's having a PET scan in about 6 weeks to check things out. It's possible that she might not even need any chemo at all, but that's best case. In any case, it's a lot better news than we were expecting, and far better than we dreamed of.

We're both sure that positive thoughts helped a great deal, and that's due in part to all of you who cared to send things or even just pass on best wishes via a comment. We really can't thank you enough, but hope that you'll enjoy the picture!